Hi Hans!
I agree that picking user-defined LEDs as an example might not have been the best choice. Stuff like that should probably go into more 'generic' frameworks, e.g. a place to deal with those would be to define them in the device tree and have a proper driver handling them.
Unfortunately I can't think of another prominent/convincing example for this kind of tweaking... (maybe board-specific hardware quirks?)
IIRC, I started the whole thing while trying to incorporate some 'personal' config changes (like support for the "led" command, a modified "bootcmd" and netconsole activation). The difficulty I encountered with that was that while the build system seems to accept certain options, it would happily ignore other CONFIG_* settings from the *_defconfig (anything not in Kconfig?), which led me to take the ".h include" route.
Many other boards seem to use a similar approach, often with quite minimal .h files (e.g. include/configs/xilinx-ppc440.h or rpi.h) I understand that this might be "old" U-Boot configuration style, and thus deprecated - that's certainly a valid objection.
Regards, B. Nortmann
Am 22.08.2015 16:02, schrieb Hans de Goede:
We want to move away from using CONFIG_SYS_EXTRA_OPTIONS, not start using more of them.
The proper way to deal with this would be to allow defining one or more LED gpio pins in Kconfig, like e.g. the USB?_VBUS_PIN config options in board/sunxi/Kconfig, and then modify the generic code paths so that these will be used when set.
This way we get led support for all boards in one go (once all the defconfig-s are updated to set the gpio pins), and we do not end up with board specific code.
Regards,
Hans